As the man who pulled off the improbable feat of translating a theme-park ride into a multimillion dollar movie franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer is not afraid of a challenge. But with Prince of Persia, a sun-scorched swashbuckler starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton, and based on a popular video game series, he has taken on what might be his riskiest venture yet.

Originally created by twentysomething American designer Jordan Mechner in 1989, Prince of Persia is one of gaming’s most enduring franchises, a rollicking adventure series with the kind of exotic setting and epic sweep that feel a natural fit for a summer movie blockbuster – but if only it were that simple. Perhaps more than any other subgenre of cinema, the history of films adapted from games is littered with embarrassments and catastrophes.

The phenomenon can be traced back to the early Nineties when diabolical re-imaginings of Super Mario Bros (1993) and Street Fighter (1994), two of the most popular games of the time, hit the big screen. The former, in particular, was a preposterous movie: out went Nintendo’s imaginative, candy-coated Mushroom Kingdom; in came a dystopian alternate dimension ruled by dinosaurs. The film set the tone for cinema’s uneasy approach to video game crossovers, sucking in the source game’s characters and locations, chewing them up and spitting them out as something almost entirely unrecognisable.

Paul W.S Anderson’s 2002 film Resident Evil is another case in point. The original horror game, by Japanese developer Capcom, had an excruciating script that could have come from a B-movie, but its evocative, oppressive atmosphere made up for that, and exerted a powerful hold on the player’s imagination. The game abandoned the player alone among the creepy halls of Arklay Mansion, a looming gothic zombie-infested pile. Anderson’s film, by contrast, deposited an entire squad of tooled-up soldiers into a squeaky clean underground laboratory. Milla Jovovich played the protagonist as an all-action babe with repressed memories of kung-fu techniques. Subtle, it was not.

Interestingly, zombie tsar George A Romero was initially attached to the project as both writer and director. Since his film, Night of the Living Dead, had provided the greatest inspiration for the Resident Evil game, he seemed the perfect candidate to rework the game into an entertaining slice of pulp cinema. And, to the delight of gamers, his completed script – which can be found floating around on the internet – remained loyal to the series’ atmosphere. But, for reasons unknown, his script was rejected. While there is no guarantee Romero’s version would have been a success, the game’s fans were left wondering what might have been.

There are few, if any, honourable exceptions here. The Mark Wahlberg vehicle Max Payne (2008) managed to capture the trippy, ghostly grit of the game’s visuals, but forgot to bring anything else to the party. Christophe Gans’s Silent Hill (2006) had a good stab at recreating the horrifying “Otherworld”; a grimy, industrial nightmare, painted in blood and rust. But the plot quickly descended into gruesome senselessness, widely missing the sharp, psychological terror of its source.

Arguably, the films that make the best use of video game influence are not adaptations at all. Tom Tykwer’s kinetic Run Lola Run (1999) explores the consequences of mistakes and – uncannily like a game – allows the heroine to “retry” her mission, while James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) asks us to leave reality behind altogether, immersing ourselves in the intoxicating world of Pandora.

"Immersion” is the holy grail of video games; developers spend years crafting fantastical but coherent other-worlds that players will want to spend time in, and be reluctant to leave. Pandora’s ebullient colours and Cameron’s tight, sweeping cinematography involves us in a similar way, making us feel as if we, too, are on the mystical planet, operating shoulder to shoulder alongside the film’s hero, if never actually controlling his moves.

Control is, in the end, the defining barrier between games and films. The very best video games will make a virtue of the player’s interaction in the plot, teasing the boundaries of player influence, granting us choices; action and reaction.

The finest films, meanwhile, are guided by expert authorial control; the director takes us by the hand, and leads or misleads us as he wishes, allowing us to sit back and lose ourselves in the story.

That distinction is the hurdle over which so many film adaptations of video games have stumbled. The experience of seeing a bad one is, ultimately, like having to sit and watch while someone else plays the game. And, as any gamer will tell you, that’s just no fun at all.